A costumed singer warbles his love for a girl named Micaela, who stole his heart. The strain of violins and brassy trumpets linger in the hot, gardenia-scented air.

It’s the archetypical mariachi-band scene, one that might be found anywhere in Mexico. But in this particular band, Mariachi Agave Azul, only about half of the players are Mexican or Mexican-American—an unusual statistic in the mariachi scene. And the band is far from the U.S. border—they live in Alaska, which has unexpectedly become one of the most diverse states in America and the setting for a demographic transition: the growth of the Hispanic population in America.

Mariachi Agave Azul was created by two church friends three years ago. Both Mexican-American, they wanted to play mariachi music to fill a cultural void and express their own identities. The band’s name mixes Mexico and Alaska together: Agave is the famous Mexican nectar from which tequila is distilled, and azul—Spanish for “blue”—is a tribute to Alaska’s blue skies and ocean.

“At first, I just wanted to set up a band to practice and see how [we’d] do, and I never expected it to come this far,” said guitarron player German Badillo, 23. “Before, it was just like, ‘Hey, want to jam out?’ And from then on we just started liking it.”

German Badillo, guitarronist (Courtesy of Brooke Binkowski)

The thirteen musicians make up the first and—as far as they know—only mariachi group in Alaska. Judging by the number of gigs they score and the size of the crowds the band draws, the band’s reputation is growing. The group’s target audience is getting bigger, too: Alaska’s Latino and Hispanic populations jumped by more than 51 percent between 2000 and 2010, according to Census data. Twenty percent of Alaskan Hispanics are Mexican. For years, Alaska has been thought of as little more than a snowy, racially homogenous outpost, but the state is transforming into a surprisingly cosmopolitan and diverse place.

“My intention was always to bring back Mexican culture to our Mexican youth, because I felt that our Mexican-Americans are forgetting how to speak Spanish or are ashamed of it,” said Badillo, who grew up listening to mariachi music with his brother, another member of the group. “I’m proud of where I’m from, born and raised here in Anchorage. I’m really proud of calling myself an Alaskan. But I’m also very proud to be Mexican.”

Violinist Mariana Herrera-Arteaga, Badillo’s co-founder, moved to Alaska two decades ago but still visits Mexico frequently. Like Badillo, she sees the band’s music as a way to carve out an identity for Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in Alaska.

“The way that my mom raised me was always, ‘Show them the good side, the beautiful side of Mexico,’” recalled Herrera-Arteaga. “A lot of people here, even Mexicans, Latinos, white people … they’re always like, ‘Mexico’s a dangerous place, a dangerous country,’ and they don’t know how culturally rich it is.”

"I’m proud of calling myself an Alaskan. But I’m also very proud to be Mexican.”

Herrera-Arteaga’s family’s move, like many others, was prompted by economic necessity. Twenty years ago, Mexico was deep in a financial crisis, prompting Herrera-Arteaga’s father to find work as a cook in Anchorage. The family ended up staying, lured by the ease of finding work and Alaska’s great natural beauty.

The state’s newly settled minority groups are also getting married, having children, and settling in for the long term. Many of those marriages are interracial or interethnic, and often, family members move to Alaska to be near children or siblings. Several Anchorage neighborhoods are outpacing the rest of the United States in terms of minority growth and integration.

Leila Spelman, violinist (Courtesy of Brooke Binkowski)

Another member of Mariachi Agave Azul, 23-year-old Leila Spelman, is of Japanese, German, and Indonesian descent. She was trained as a classical violinist, but for the past three years she has been performing with the mariachi band. Spelman said who she is seems less important to their audience than what she does—her diverse background is not just a novelty.

“Everybody's really impressed with the fact that there are more than just Latino people within the mariachi,” Spelman said. “They love that there's people who aren't obviously of a Hispanic background.”

Spelman said that while audience members have commented on the diverse backgrounds of Agave Azul’s musicians, no one has ever complained about it. In fact, fans embrace it, along with Alaska’s colorful new history.

“Because of the way I look [and] the way I sound, I don’t present myself as somebody who, kind of saying it roughly, ‘came off the boat,’” said Spelman. “[The audience will] just assume, ‘Oh, she grew up here,’ which is nice. Being in America, people don’t really care about that anymore.”

Most Popular

Should you drink more coffee? Should you take melatonin? Can you train yourself to need less sleep? A physician’s guide to sleep in a stressful age.

During residency, Iworked hospital shifts that could last 36 hours, without sleep, often without breaks of more than a few minutes. Even writing this now, it sounds to me like I’m bragging or laying claim to some fortitude of character. I can’t think of another type of self-injury that might be similarly lauded, except maybe binge drinking. Technically the shifts were 30 hours, the mandatory limit imposed by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, but we stayed longer because people kept getting sick. Being a doctor is supposed to be about putting other people’s needs before your own. Our job was to power through.

The shifts usually felt shorter than they were, because they were so hectic. There was always a new patient in the emergency room who needed to be admitted, or a staff member on the eighth floor (which was full of late-stage terminally ill people) who needed me to fill out a death certificate. Sleep deprivation manifested as bouts of anger and despair mixed in with some euphoria, along with other sensations I’ve not had before or since. I remember once sitting with the family of a patient in critical condition, discussing an advance directive—the terms defining what the patient would want done were his heart to stop, which seemed likely to happen at any minute. Would he want to have chest compressions, electrical shocks, a breathing tube? In the middle of this, I had to look straight down at the chart in my lap, because I was laughing. This was the least funny scenario possible. I was experiencing a physical reaction unrelated to anything I knew to be happening in my mind. There is a type of seizure, called a gelastic seizure, during which the seizing person appears to be laughing—but I don’t think that was it. I think it was plain old delirium. It was mortifying, though no one seemed to notice.

Why the ingrained expectation that women should desire to become parents is unhealthy

In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a "safe haven" law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family -- nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

His paranoid style paved the road for Trumpism. Now he fears what’s been unleashed.

Glenn Beck looks like the dad in a Disney movie. He’s earnest, geeky, pink, and slightly bulbous. His idea of salty language is bullcrap.

The atmosphere at Beck’s Mercury Studios, outside Dallas, is similarly soothing, provided you ignore the references to genocide and civilizational collapse. In October, when most commentators considered a Donald Trump presidency a remote possibility, I followed audience members onto the set of The Glenn Beck Program, which airs on Beck’s website, theblaze.com. On the way, we passed through a life-size replica of the Oval Office as it might look if inhabited by a President Beck, complete with a portrait of Ronald Reagan and a large Norman Rockwell print of a Boy Scout.

Since the end of World War II, the most crucial underpinning of freedom in the world has been the vigor of the advanced liberal democracies and the alliances that bound them together. Through the Cold War, the key multilateral anchors were NATO, the expanding European Union, and the U.S.-Japan security alliance. With the end of the Cold War and the expansion of NATO and the EU to virtually all of Central and Eastern Europe, liberal democracy seemed ascendant and secure as never before in history.

Under the shrewd and relentless assault of a resurgent Russian authoritarian state, all of this has come under strain with a speed and scope that few in the West have fully comprehended, and that puts the future of liberal democracy in the world squarely where Vladimir Putin wants it: in doubt and on the defensive.

The same part of the brain that allows us to step into the shoes of others also helps us restrain ourselves.

You’ve likely seen the video before: a stream of kids, confronted with a single, alluring marshmallow. If they can resist eating it for 15 minutes, they’ll get two. Some do. Others cave almost immediately.

This “Marshmallow Test,” first conducted in the 1960s, perfectly illustrates the ongoing war between impulsivity and self-control. The kids have to tamp down their immediate desires and focus on long-term goals—an ability that correlates with their later health, wealth, and academic success, and that is supposedly controlled by the front part of the brain. But a new study by Alexander Soutschek at the University of Zurich suggests that self-control is also influenced by another brain region—and one that casts this ability in a different light.

Modern slot machines develop an unbreakable hold on many players—some of whom wind up losing their jobs, their families, and even, as in the case of Scott Stevens, their lives.

On the morning of Monday, August 13, 2012, Scott Stevens loaded a brown hunting bag into his Jeep Grand Cherokee, then went to the master bedroom, where he hugged Stacy, his wife of 23 years. “I love you,” he told her.

Stacy thought that her husband was off to a job interview followed by an appointment with his therapist. Instead, he drove the 22 miles from their home in Steubenville, Ohio, to the Mountaineer Casino, just outside New Cumberland, West Virginia. He used the casino ATM to check his bank-account balance: $13,400. He walked across the casino floor to his favorite slot machine in the high-limit area: Triple Stars, a three-reel game that cost $10 a spin. Maybe this time it would pay out enough to save him.

“Well, you’re just special. You’re American,” remarked my colleague, smirking from across the coffee table. My other Finnish coworkers, from the school in Helsinki where I teach, nodded in agreement. They had just finished critiquing one of my habits, and they could see that I was on the defensive.

I threw my hands up and snapped, “You’re accusing me of being too friendly? Is that really such a bad thing?”

“Well, when I greet a colleague, I keep track,” she retorted, “so I don’t greet them again during the day!” Another chimed in, “That’s the same for me, too!”

Unbelievable, I thought. According to them, I’m too generous with my hellos.

When I told them I would do my best to greet them just once every day, they told me not to change my ways. They said they understood me. But the thing is, now that I’ve viewed myself from their perspective, I’m not sure I want to remain the same. Change isn’t a bad thing. And since moving to Finland two years ago, I’ve kicked a few bad American habits.

A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses.

As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions—sights, sounds, textures, tastes—are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it—or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion—we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like.

A report will be shared with lawmakers before Trump’s inauguration, a top advisor said Friday.

Updated at 2:20 p.m.

President Obama asked intelligence officials to perform a “full review” of election-related hacking this week, and plans will share a report of its findings with lawmakers before he leaves office on January 20, 2017.

Deputy White House Press Secretary Eric Schultz said Friday that the investigation will reach all the way back to 2008, and will examine patterns of “malicious cyber-activity timed to election cycles.” He emphasized that the White House is not questioning the results of the November election.

Asked whether a sweeping investigation could be completed in the time left in Obama’s final term—just six weeks—Schultz replied that intelligence agencies will work quickly, because the preparing the report is “a major priority for the president of the United States.”

Democrats who have struggled for years to sell the public on the Affordable Care Act are now confronting a far more urgent task: mobilizing a political coalition to save it.

Even as the party reels from last month’s election defeat, members of Congress, operatives, and liberal allies have turned to plotting a campaign against repealing the law that, they hope, will rival the Tea Party uprising of 2009 that nearly scuttled its passage in the first place. A group of progressive advocacy groups will announce on Friday a coordinated effort to protect the beneficiaries of the Affordable Care Act and stop Republicans from repealing the law without first identifying a plan to replace it.

They don’t have much time to fight back. Republicans on Capitol Hill plan to set repeal of Obamacare in motion as soon as the new Congress opens in January, and both the House and Senate could vote to wind down the law immediately after President-elect Donald Trump takes the oath of office on the 20th.